Light, As A Feather, A Video That Bends Browsers

If you’re only going to watch one cool thing on the Internet today, here you go: the quasi-music video Light, As a Feather. Load it in a browser that’s not Safari, and you’re welcome.

Created by filmmaker Paul Kamuf with original music by Free Blood frontman John Pugh (formerly of the band !!!), Light, As A Feather is not embeddable, but that’s the whole point; it’s an experience that stretches beyond the video window, incorporating the entire browser in telling the story of virtual communication.

Light might seem familiar to Arcade Fire or HTML5 fans, except that Kamuf (with some programming help) created Light with JavaScript, PHP and XML. The video that plays is Flash, making it watchable across most browsers, not just Google Chrome (as in the case of the Arcade Fire/Google collaboration).

Kamuf began working on Light in his off-time several months ago, and said via phone that among his motivations for taking on the project included the ability to “use the browser as part of the storytelling. The idea was to show that the browser can move and illustrate what’s happening. That’s been possible for quite some time, but I haven’t seen much of it — I would love to see more stuff like this, that breaks the frame and take advantage of what’s on the desktop or outside the video itself to enhance what’s inside.”

As a commercial and music video director, he was also excited to be able to escape traditional aspect ratios. “Everything on YouTube or other video sharing sites is made for TV and film with old aspect ratios,” he said. “And it’s easy to make a 4:3 video and upload it, but there’s a lot more than can be done. You can have something that’s taller, then it becomes an ultra-wide frame — that’s unique to the computer experience.”

“It’s something that’s not easily copyable or pirate-able,” he added. “You could do a screen capture, but that wouldn’t really capture the experience.”